[jimcpherson]

After transferring about 200 CDs onto my iPod photo I noticed that roughly 50% of the time the album covers are not displayed on the iPod. The album art is there when I view the tracks in iTunes. Has anyone experienced this problem? Any solutions? It appears to happen at random. I pull album art from Amazon.

[CarbonG4]

I've also seen this issue before, but haven't figured out what exactly is causing it. It seems pretty random and while this doesn't seem like it would make sense, I think it may only occur when a large amount of new music is synced to the iPod at one time. I realize that the album art is part of the tag in the actual file and that the art is transferred along w/ the song regardless of the fact that it's being put on an iPod Photo -- album art takes up space on regular iPods as well -- so the art is definitely *on* the iPod, it just isn't displaying it in all cases. It's a guess that maybe the iPod photo is also doing some reformatting/compression to the cover art during the syncing process similar to how to formats imported photographs from iPhoto and I think maybe it's failing out when a huge number of songs are being pushed to the iPod at one time.

Whenever I've come across an album that has a few songs w/o the art being displayed I just resync the entire album to my iPod -- if you use automatic mode just make a small change to the tags on all of the songs and it'll recopy the entire album the next time you sync.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

//Carbon

[drive-thru]

Just guessing...Are the images that aren't displaying any larger (size or pixels) than the ones that are?
Is it full albums which are not displaying art or do some songs on an album display art while others on the same album do not?

[jimcpherson]

If the art won't show up its for every track on the CD, not just certain tracks. In terms of size, some of the largest album covers are embedded in the songs bought through the iTunes store, and these seen to all display correctly. For example, the cover for The Clash's Combat Rock, purchased thru the iTunes store, is 600x600 pixels and shows up on my iPod correctly. The Streets' Original Pirate Material, who's album art I grabbed from Amazon, is 300x296 and does not show on the iPod. I also had the thought that maybe the iPod couldn't display art that wasn't perfectly square (ie. 600x600 is O.K. while 300x296 is not). But I checked into this theory and it seems that this doesn't matter (Motorhead's Ace of Spades is 300x300 and does not show up on the iPod). This is frustrating...

[w.weber]

Strange. I sent 11,000+ songs to my iPod photo in one go, and as far as I can see all my covers (about 95% of the songs have one) show up. My covers are from all kinds of sources, but none from iTMS.

[vdrummer]

my iPod Photo is experiencing similar problems; I don't have any explanations, but I have thrown several non-square images (3:2 proportion) onto albums, and they do display fine.

I might guess that it could be a an image mode issue, maybe related to color space of the image file (apple RGB, adobe RGB, etc), color mode (RGB, CMYK, etc), or particular file type (interlaced or non-interlaced GIF, 8 or 16 bit, JPEG compression, etc).

maybe some developer note spec or knowledge base info describes any limitations that exist.

[Rychiar]

this sux, im thinkin of gettin a ipod photo as my new ipod and this was somethin i really looked forward to cus i have all the covers on my music

[jimcpherson]

I was thinking it might be a file type issue as well (GIF, JPEG, interlaced, etc.). but if a certain format was required for viewing album covers I would think (at best) itunes would convert the files to the correct format when loading songs onto an ipod, like it does with photos, or (at worst) there would be documentation somewhere stating what the correct format is so the user can convert it themselves. I'm hoping its just a bug that the next iPod software update will fix.

[Rychiar]

as long as they drop the price a tad on these suckers at macworld b4 i buy one ill be happy, lol